1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to recreational and educational games and particularly to word building games employing chance means for displaying letters used in the play of the game.
2. Description of Prior Games
Word building games are known, of course. In one such game a plurality of square tiles, each tile bearing one consonant or one vowel, is used. A more or less arbitrarily fixed differential scoring value is assigned to the letter appearing on each tile. A fixed number of tiles is picked at ramdom by each player and the players construct words, in turn, by placing tiles bearing letters forming the desired word on a specially designed game board. The scoring is derived from the length of the formed word, the differential values of the tiles used, and the fortuitous opportunity for placement of tiles in certain bonus areas upon the game board. Games of this type have several significant and disadvantageous differences from that disclosed herein, including, for example:
At each player's turn, words can be formed only from the limited small number of tiles that the player has before him; PA1 The player is restricted further in the number, variety, and potential score of the words he can form by the configurations of words (and letters comprising them) already on the game board that have resulted from earlier play during the game; PA1 The necessity of a game board and many small, individual tiles not only decreases the facile and safe portability of game equipment, but also makes play of the game quite difficult where there usually is not available (e.g., in any moving passenger carrier or in many outdoor circumstances) a suitably-sized, stable surface.
Word games employing a plurality of cubical dice have been proposed. See for example, U.S. Pat. No. 2,491,883 to Welch and U.S. Pat. No. 1,524,529 to Allen. In such games, the faces of the set of dice bear vowels as well as consonants and the frequency of occurrence of any of the letters with respect to the other letters is not in accordance with the expected frequency of occurrence of that letter in a stock vocabulary as defined above. This not only restricts the possible number of letter combinations that can be used, but also skews the distribution of words that can be formed toward those that employ the letters appearing with disproportionately high frequency in the set. Therefore, in some instances differential scoring values must be applied to the letters to compensate for their non-stock vocabulary letter distribution.